Chapter 3: Thigh to Thigh on the Piano Bench

Thirty-seven days, and I had become a woman who owned a tuning lever and knew how to use it.

This week I’d been greedy. The A again, a whisker flat, and a D in the octave below for good measure, because one fault can be weather but two begin to look like a job. I lay awake afterward composing the lie I’d tell if Edmund noticed the second one first. He didn’t notice either. He noticed that the Financial Times had been delivered late.

A navy skirt that stopped at the knee and swung when I walked. A fitted white shirt. Under them, lavender lace I’d never worn, bought on the same trip as the ivory and hidden at the back of a drawer as if it might go off in daylight. It was scratchy and pretty and absolutely unnecessary, and I thought about it every time I sat down.

Edmund’s blinds were up.

I could see him from the kitchen, framed in the boathouse glass across the wet gravel like a man in a painting of a man working: shirtsleeves, reading glasses, two screens, a cold cup of coffee he’d forget. If he raised his eyes, he’d see straight into the music room. The Steinway sat between us with its tail toward him, and when Ansel propped the lid, it rose like a black sail and hid the bench end of the piano, and the keyboard, and whoever might be sitting there, from the waist down.

From the waist up, we were a picture window.

Ansel arrived on the stroke of ten, as he always did. Rain on his hair. He nodded at me and at the courtyard in the same economical movement, as if logging both.

“Coffee?”

“Please. Black.”

I brought it to him at the piano and set it on a coaster on the floor, well away from the instrument, and then instead of going back to the island I sat down on the bench beside him.

“I thought I’d watch properly,” I said. “If it doesn’t put you off.”